Expert cites reason for Bitcoin mempool congestion

The Bitcoin mempool has not cleared since mid-April — at present it contains around 393,000 unconfirmed transactions. This was reported by Glassnode analyst James Check.

The #Bitcoin mempool has not cleared since mid April.

This explosion in blockspace demand is actually pretty unique, and this thread is a quick exploration on what is actually going on.

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— _Checkɱate ?⚡?☢️?️ (@_Checkmatey_) September 21, 2023

According to the expert, fee pressure in the network has eased significantly since May. He noted that fees in the blockchain have risen for a bear market, but are far from levels seen in the bull market.

Meanwhile, the dollar-denominated volume of moved bitcoins is approaching a yearly low, Check noted.

«Итак, у нас перегруженный мемпул, пиковые показатели активности, но низкие объемы переводов? Причина — Ordinals. Bitcoin inscriptions, especially textual ones, currently account for 50% to 60% of confirmed transactions, and this has been the case since mid-April (the mempool has been full since then),» he explained.

Ordinals on average occupy only about 10% of the block size by bytes, but account for about 20% of fees.

«Nадписи чувствительны к высоким комиссиям, но готовы покупать дешевое блок-пространство. […] С более философской точки зрения мне действительно нравится тот факт, что люди могут платить за биткоин-граффити», — подытожил эксперт.

At the end of August, the share of Bitcoin-NFT transactions in the network reached 85%. Since the protocol’s launch, создано 34,6 млн надписей with a total volume of 12.9 GB.

Earlier this May, Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr proposed to implement a “spam filter” for tokens of the BRC-20 standard and Ordinals because of their negative impact on the network.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, by contrast, supported the protocol for launching Bitcoin-NFTs, calling its emergence a return to the “culture of creators” in the blockchain of the first cryptocurrency.